General summary. and he gecwemde [pleased] me manna betst on dam plegan; forðam ic hine gelaðode to dysum urum gebeorscipe. Nát ic hwæt he is, ne hwanon he is; ac gif du wille witan hwæt he sy, axsa hine, forðam be gedafenað [it befits] þæt þu wite. Da eode þæt mæden to Apollonio, and mid forwandigendre [respectful] spræce cwæð, Ɖeah ðu stille sy and unrót [sad], þeah ic pine ædelborennesse od de geseo: nu þonne, gif de to hefig ne pince, sege me þinne naman, and pin gelymp arece [accident tell me. Da cwæð Apollonius, Gif ðu for neode axsast æfter minum naman, ic secge þe, ic hine forleas on sæ. Gif du wilt mine ædelborennesse witan, wite du þæt ic hig forlet on Tharsum. Ðæt mæden cwæð, Sege me gewislicor, þæt ic hit mæge understandan. Apollonius þa soðlice hyre arehte ealle his gelymp, and æt þare spræcan ende him feollon tearas of dam eagum. It seems unnecessary to take any minute notice of survey and the latest fragments of pure Anglo-Saxon writing, such as the well-known passage from the Chronicle about the sufferings of the people in the castles of the robber barons during Stephen's reign. There is nothing new to be found in them, and there was not likely to be. It will be more profitable to take some general (if still interim) view of the rhythmical and "stylistic" character of the literature as a whole a posteriori, as a counterpart to the examination given above of the apparent characteristics of the language as capable of such expression a priori. A sane criticism will certainly not put either its capabilities or its performance very low; though such a criticism will hardly endorse the enthusiastic estimate of Mr. Earle. For what may be called, without the least insulting intention, the childish things of prose-narration, simple instruction, or, in other words, conveyance of information in a straightforward, not slovenly, intelligible way,-Anglo-Saxon displays itself as excellently suited. If the famous definition of style, as being nothing else but the clear expression of the meaning, be accepted, the oldest form of our language may certainly be said to possess it in a very high degree. 1 If anybody should say, "Why do you quote Earle? He is quite obsolete as a scholar," my answer is ready: "Please show me any scholar of the present day who has shown himself to be equally conversant, from the literary point of view, with Old, Middle, and Modern English. I know one, perhaps two; but neither has written in extenso on the matter. * Coleridge's, though not quite in his words. Neither, as we have seen, is it incapable of proceeding to a degree (in the other sense) still higher, and of expressing that meaning in a fashion a cujusque natura fluens-a style expressing the idiosyncrasy of the writer or speaker by ornament and suggestion of various kinds. On the whole, however, these gifts are expended on too small a range of subjects, and the writers are too busy with the subject itself. Every now and then, as in the well-known description of the mandrake and the process of safely collecting it, with some others in the Leechdoms1 and elsewhere, as well as in the works previously noted, one receives the suggestion that, if the range had been less limited and the temptation to original composition 2 larger, a much greater development might have taken place. Yet it may seem more probable that the stock-in-trade of the language was as yet too limited for prose of the first quality. And the phenomena which we have seen in Ælfric confirm this in a striking manner. Here is a literature which seems to some extent to contradict the general adage, “Verse first, prose afterwards." Yet after centuries of exercise in both, it seems to know hardly any other way of attaining elaborate prose than to fall back on the very forms and fashions of verse itself. Now this is an evil sign. There is nothing unhealthy in the process so long as the form of prose itself is kept. On the contrary, we have since seen three, if not four, periods in which prose has borrowed something from verse to its immense advantage: in the mid-seventeenth century, after the great Elizabethan period; in the later eighteenth century, after the work of Dryden and Pope; in the third decade of the nineteenth, after the first 1 Anglo-Saxon Leechdoms, etc. (3 vols., "Rolls Series," London, 1864-66), a book which, if it were not full of interest in itself, I should cherish for the memory of its editor, Thomas Oswald Cockayne, one of the least pedantic and most original schoolmasters that any one ever had the luck to be taught by. The "Mandrake" is also in Thorpe's Analecta, p. 116. 2 The extreme care with which interlined translations or glosses were made, and the effect they must have exercised, can be best seen from the Liber Scintillarum, possibly eighth century (E. E.T.S., 1889). They also extended (see Cockayne's Preface to Leechdoms) to Greek in separate words, if not in continuous passages. Romantic group; in the seventh or eighth, after the work of those about Tennyson. But none of the great prose masters of these periods, neither Browne nor Taylor, neither Johnson nor Burke, neither Landor nor De Quincey, neither Mr. Pater nor any one else, becomes a mere transfuga from prose to verse like Ælfric in his occasional and indeed frequent use of alliteration and stavedivision. There is something apparently like it in Mr. Ruskin's excessive addiction to blank-verse insets; but, as we shall see, I hope, in due time, the appearance is partly if not wholly deceptive. Such a falling back upon the tricks of verse, especially of a verse which was itself losing its stamina, and turning to rhyme and other formerly uncongenial things, is an almost unmistakable handwriting on the wall, prophetic of the passing of a kingdom. CHAPTER III THE FORMATION OF PROSE RHYTHM IN MIDDLE Importance and difficulty of Early and Middle English in our subject-The Ancren Riwle-Analysis of passages-"The Wooing of Our Lord"-Other twelfth and thirteenth century piecesGeneral remarks on early Middle English prose-Influence of the Vulgate, and of French prose. and difficulty English in our I HAVE endeavoured elsewhere1 to make good the position Importance that if any one would English prosody win, with Middle of Early and English he must needs begin. The truth (though a Middle stage of preliminary enquiry, then almost unimportant, is subject. now of great importance) remains still true in regard to prose; and it could not but be so, seeing that it is in this period that the English language proper is formed, and that, in consequence, we must look to it for the origin of all the formal characteristics of English literature. But the quest is here much more darkling, and the results scantier and more doubtful, than in the case of verse. In the first and main place, we have now returned to the usual law of literary order which Anglo-Saxon seems to violate, or at least to ignore. The new blend achieves itself slowly; and such achievement as there is, for the first two or three centuries, is mainly in verse. Moreover, while the great preponderance of ecclesiastical and theological literature in Anglo-Saxon had not been without effects, and those not wholly beneficial effects, on the development of prose in the new 1 In the History of English Prosody, and also in A Historical Manual of English Prosody. period, it is not a case of preponderance, it is one of monopoly. With the exception of the later parts of the Chronicle, which are almost pure Anglo-Saxon, and have been dealt with in so far as they need dealing, it may almost be said that there is not a single piece of prose of a profane kind in English from the Conquest to the birth. of Chaucer-all but three hundred years. The great twelfth-century school of historians employs Latin solely; and hands on the vehicle. There are no prose vernacular scientific or miscellaneous treatises worth speaking of in early Middle English; there are no prose romances except Saints' Lives. In these, therefore, in Homilies, and in other divisions of the same kind of literature, we have to seek our only quarry. This is almost all translation,1 and even among it there is but one piece of bulk and merit combined, the Ancren Riwle. It is particularly important to remember that in the earlier part of this time there was no French prose to imitate; though it is barely possible that by the time of the Riwle there was; indeed, there are theories of a French original. French words, as we shall see, there are, and they are most important; while the author distinctly anticipates reading of English or French on the part of his disciple-ladies. But even earlier there had been some strivings. Professor Earle, enthusiast as he was, could find nothing (he does not even mention the Ancren Riwle) to cite and comment on except the beautiful if rather morbid "Wooing of Our Lord," to which we shall come in due course. But it will be desirable here to select and comment a little more widely. The various treatises and homilies included in Dr. Morris's Old English Miscellany and Old English Homilies may be scattered over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, according to 1 There was, of course, preaching in English all along; we know, for instance, that the famous Abbot Samson of St. Edmund's "preached to the people in English, but in the Norfolk dialect." This must have been years before the probable date of the Ancren Riwle; for Samson became abbot in 1182, and was then forty-seven years old. He also "read English rolls," which seems not to have been a common accomplishment. But we do not know what he read. 2 Ancren Riwle (ed. Morton, Camden Society, London, 1853), p. 44. |